Dingus of the Week Podcast

Mitch McConnell hasn't been seen in public in nearly a month. No photo, no video, no floor vote — just a statement from his office insisting the 83-year-old Senate Republican leader is "fully engaged" from his hospital bed. Meanwhile, the Senate is back in session, a defense bill and national security votes are on the table, and the guy who chairs the Rules Committee and the defense appropriations...

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is an awe-inspiring site. While maybe meant to evoke introspection, it mostly evokes laughter these days. President Donald Trump wanted to clean it up. To give it a fresh coat of American flag-blue paint. But now the pool is algae-green. The paint job is peeling. And Trump's budget for the renovation keeps growing by the day. This week on DINGUS OF THE WEEK, LY...

There is a 90-foot-tall, 600-ton steel structure on the South Lawn of the White House, assembled on grounds normally used for Easter egg rolls, Marine One departures, and a garden honoring presidents' children. UFC calls it The Claw. The event — UFC Freedom 250 — is scheduled for June 14, coinciding with Flag Day and Trump's 80th birthday. In the weeks before the fight, Trump invested up to $50,00...

Spencer Pratt was reality television's first fully self-aware villain — a man who admitted, on camera, that he was performing villainy for an audience. He staged a fake divorce, manipulated storylines, and turned being unlikeable into a career. The Hills did make him famous. It also made him a case study in how American media rewards people who understand that the camera is on and someone's watchi...

It's graduation season in America, and at Glendale Community College in Arizona, the administration decided to hand the most important moment of the academic calendar — the calling of your name, in front of peers and family — to an algorithm. The AI skipped people. Many students missed their moment of recognition. The crowd booed. The president called it "a lesson learned." This week on DINGUS OF...

The United States is wrapped in a weather pattern we've taken to calling a Dingus Hydra. That is a multiheaded beast, each head uglier than the last. To name a few: A racist livestreamer named Dalton Eatherly —known online as "Chud the Builder" because of course he is—ran up a steakhouse tab he refused to pay, got arrested, bonded out, and then managed to get himself shot outside a Tennessee court...

Steven Roth is the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, one of the largest real estate companies in the United States. Through it, he controls billions of dollars in property across New York City. And he has used this immense platform to *checks notes* compare taxing the rich to a genocide. You may remember "tax the rich" from such contexts as literally every democratic society that has ever existed, or m...

Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, which means he is in charge of the most powerful military in human history. And he has used this immense position to *checks script* give Kid Rock a helicopter ride. You may remember Kid Rock from such hits as "Bawitdaba" and "All Summer Long," or more recently, from being the guy whose Nashville estate got buzzed by Army Ap...

The story goes that Jimmy Donaldson was a normal kid growing up in North Carolina who spent five years studying virality on YouTube. "There's a five-year point in my life where I was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm," Donaldson told Rolling Stone in 2022. The thing he learned shaped a very specific kind of video format: quick cuts, over...

Vice President J.D. Vance became Catholic in 2019, and he has some notes on the incense we're using at mass. It's always the new guy. “Now we can, of course, have disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just, but I think in the way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy, I think it’s very, very important...

You may know Geno Auriemma as the winningest coach in NCAA basketball history. Twelve championships. Forty seasons. The kind of record that fluffs up the first sentence of everything written about you. And not for no reason. But last weekend, UConn's undefeated season came to a stunning end in the Final Four against Dawn Staley's South Carolina Gamecocks. Auriemma—who for the record, was losing th...

You interrupted Survivor 50 for this? President Donald Trump declared mission accomplished—or at least "nearing completion"—in Iran. The President brought us into another crusade in the Middle East, and already civilian death toll is in the thousands. There's no agreed-upon goals. And his White House accidentally uploaded a speech where he said it was a bummer the American people weren't patient e...

Flying in America is already a full-contact sport. Airlines nickel-and-diming you for the privilege of existing, a guy in 14B who thinks the armrest is his birthright, and TSA agents who haven't been paid in 90 days because Congress can't agree on whether border agents should be able to wear a mask when they shoot a citizen. And into this masterpiece of dysfunction, President Donald Trump said: yo...

You may know Joe Rogan from Fear Factor, where he paid people to eat bugs. You may know him from the 90s TV show News Radio, where he played a handyman obcessed with conspiracy theories — a role he has not stopped playing since. You may know him from the time he told millions of people that ivermectin was a reasonable COVID treatment. Or you may know him from November 2024, when he had Donald Trum...

Cricket finally got his revenge. This week, Trump bid farewell to Kristie Noem and her tenure at the US Dept. of Homeland Security the only way he knows how: the last line of a Truth social post: "I thank Kristi for her service at “Homeland,”" Trump truthed (derogatory). And with her removal to become the *checks script* Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas (???), she has a replacement. Ev...

You may know US Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith from her cheerful offer to sit front row at a public hanging. You may know her from trying to name a stretch of interstate after the president of the Confederacy. YOU MAY know her for voting to cut food stamps for 384,000 Mississippians or knock 115,000 people off of Medicaid. With such a stinky track record, you'd expect her to have cleaned up a bit. But no....

It's a week of consequences — just not here. South Korea convicted its president for declaring martial law. The sex pest formerly known as Prince Andrew briefly saw the inside of a jail cell. And somewhere in an America slowly descending into fascism, Chief Justice John Robert s probably read his novel. Can you say hero? You may know Roberts from his greatest hits: handing a sitting president immu...

We're not known for our segues around here. But pivoting from child sex trafficking allegations to "The Dow right now is over $50,000"? That's not training—that's talent. The dingus crown goes to Attorney General Pam Bondi. This week, she sat before Congress to answer questions about the Epstein files—except she didn't. She screamed about Merrick Garland. She called sitting representative a "washe...

It's Super Bowl weekend, and while Bad Bunny prepares to bring Puerto Rico to the halftime stage, Turning Point USA is bringing an alternative halftime show to the American right. And the alt-right show starting noted halfwit Kid Rock. You surely know Mr. Rock from his contributions to American letters. Lines like "bawitdaba da bang da dang diggy diggy." This week on DINGUS OF THE WEEK, hosts L YZ...

US Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota stood at a townhall podium this week ready to demand US Department of Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem's resignation. That's when an a man sprayed her with a then-unknown substance. Without missing a beat, Omar kept going—demanding Noem resign or face impeachment. "These fucking assholes are not gonna get away with it," Omar told her team before finishing her rema...

When Gregory Bovino was a little boy he sat in a dark theater and watched The Border (1982) where Jack Nicholson gets tied up in the corrupt world of border police. Years later, Little Greg would say this movie motivated him to join the force. Because if you can't make the world better, you can at least get attention for making it worse. Bovino is a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent...

Youtuber Nick Shirley has been trying to make it big on the internet for years. Maybe there's truth in the old saying: at first you racist dog whistles don't get the views, try, try again. Your work could help rationalize the occupation of a city and murder of woman. This week on DINGUS OF THE WEEK, hosts LYZ LENZ and ZACHARY OREN SMITH scream into the void about Shirley's work demonizing Somali r...

As the US reengages with its roots in empire, it does so with a lot of leaders who just don't speak the language. Maybe that would help? Food for thought. On this episode of DINGUS OF THE WEEK , writer TAYLOR KAY PHILLIPS gets in on the dingus action with her pick: monolingualism. Hosts LYZ LENZ and ZACHARY OREN SMITH yell with Phillips about languages—dead and otherwise—and ask whether "gonorrhea...

Is it a surprise that a host of Fox Business' "The Big Money Show" would back AI data centers to quick? No. But did you have to go full Hallmark villain in the process? Also no. On this episode of DINGUS OF THE WEEK , hosts LYZ LENZ and ZACHARY OREN SMITH yell about Dagan McDowell's war on Christmas. When people got upset that a proposed AI data center energy project would impact a Christmas tree...

At the end of the year, federal subsidies that have helped make the Affordable Care Act more affordable will expire kicking an estimated 10 million Americans off their insurance. That is unless Congress acts to meaningfully make healthcare more available in the United States... Don't get your hopes up. On this episode of DINGUS OF THE WEEK , hosts LYZ LENZ and ZACHARY OREN SMITH yell about Republi...